Greg Lindsay's Blog

July 29, 2016  |  permalink

Up with Trains! Down with “Smart Homes!”

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I have a pair of mentions in The Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor this morning respectively praising trains and warning about “smart homes.”

The Washington Post’s Dom Philips wonders whether next month’s Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro will be a traffic apocalypse despite last-ditch efforts to open new metro and bus rapid transit lines in time. BRT is a good start, I said, but ultimately insufficient:

Greg Lindsay, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, said that setting up a bus rapid-transit system is less expensive and faster than building metro lines. But the buses carry fewer people – 17,000 an hour compared with 80,000 or more an hour for a metro line.

“The costs are cheaper at the beginning, but maintenance costs over time are higher than rail,” he said. “You need to take BRT routes and eventually turn them into rail.”

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor asks if Amazon’s voice-activated digital assistant, Alexa, is only the beginning of what will become increasing smart homes. The piece mentions the report I co-wrote and presented in March with the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative on the perils and unintended consequences of such tech:

Panelists at an Atlantic Council event March 31 suggested the lack of guidelines for internet-connected devices in the home could even be used against consumers, as the Monitor’s Jack Detsch reported.

“In the future, if you’re behind [on payments], you could be locked in your house until you pay back your bills,” Greg Lindsay, a senior fellow at the New Cities Foundation, told the Monitor.

We live in interesting times.

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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